Re: What's an annex? stratum?

Daniel Jacobowitz
2007-06-25T19:32:11Z

On Mon, Jun 25, 2007 at 03:19:32PM -0400, Paul Koning wrote:
> That's really unfortunate. Comments in code are useful but they are
> no substitute for properly written internals documentation.
>
> By contrast, the internals documentation of GCC seems to be pretty
> helpful and reasonably up to date.

You may have noticed that GCC has approximately ten times as many
active contributors. Maybe twenty. It is not twenty times as
complex. There is no feasible way for the GDB contributors to even
respond to all the incoming bug reports; maintaining internals
documentation of the quality of GCC's would probably require two
contributors' full time effort.

Do you see two spare contributors? If you do, let me know, please.

> For example: Bug #186 has been troubling us on and off for a long
> time. I would like to fix it. But given that this involves going off
> into the deep jungle of the GDB symbol and type machinery, and the
> fact that there is no useable documentation for this stuff, I haven't
> been able to do this.

It's really not as inscrutable as you make it sound, and there are
plenty of people willing to answer questions. Especially for people
who are interested in fixing bugs and/or improving the documentation.

--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery